Posts Tagged «brains»

In a nod to the prescience of the Magna Carta and social expediency it spawned, a group of neurally-inclined futurists have begun to draft a similar constitution for ourselves. This new “Magna Cortica” has set for itself the task of defining a set of rights and restrictions to preempt potential abuses in the rapidly growing field of cognitive enhancement.

It appears that applying an electrical current to your brain not only boosts your cognitive powers, but it can also help you obtain the mystical ability of lucid dreaming, where you can control the plot and outcome of your dreams. These findings come from a new study that found that lucid dreaming could be induced in a full 70% of participants, with a simple (external) electrical current passed across the frontal lobe. This has obvious applications for body hackers — but perhaps more importantly it may have a medical use, too, in helping people who suffer from chronic nightmares.

Thanks to the work of a small group neuroscientists and theoretical physicists over the last few years, we may finally have found a way of analyzing the mysterious, metaphysical realm of consciousness in a scientific manner. The latest breakthrough in this new field, published by Max Tegmark of MIT, postulates that consciousness is actually a state of matter, allowing us to scientifically tackle murky topics such as self awareness, and why we perceive the world in classical three-dimensional terms, rather than the infinite number of objective realities offered up by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Like a startup company in search of a mission statement, neuromorphic engineering has yet to define for itself a clear path forward. There have been advances in a few select pockets — Synaptics’ touchpads, Foveon’s CMOS color imagers, or Sonic Innovation’s hearing aids may come to mind — but as a whole, the field knows neither what it wants exactly, nor how to do it. A roadmap to the future has recently been published by researchers from Georgia Tech. The end goal is nothing less than human-brain equivalent processing.

Surgeons in Holland implanted a plastic skull in a woman with a rare disorder. Incredibly, the rare bone disease that was wrecking her vision and destroying her life has been been bested by a simple 3D printer.

The crow and its larger cousin the raven are universally held as avian geniuses, chess champions among birds. A recent study in Nature takes a closer look at some of their skills and raises a fundamental question: would a general intelligence, either artificial, alien, or of our natural world, have features or behaviors we might predict from the organization of its brain alone?

While scientists have documented numerous cases where the children of parents who experienced significant trauma in life have in fact inherited specific predispositions, direct experimental evidence for this phenomenon, and a plausible mechanism, has until now, been lacking. Reporting in Nature Neuroscience, researchers have now shown that mice can inherit the acquired fears of their fathers through some mysterious reprogramming of — his sperm.

Over the last few decades, we’ve slowly gained the ability to digitally affect the human senses. First, of course, there was smell-o-vision, which releases a combination of chemicals to simulate a specific scent. With electrical stimulation of our nerves, we can simulate the sensation of touch. In the last few years, we’ve seen retinal implants that let digital circuitry directly interface with the optic nerve, creating the sensation of sight. For some reason, though, the one sense that we haven’t electronically manipulated is taste. Now, thanks to a new electrode developed by the National University of Singapore, that might soon change.

A stroke can affect anyone, and at any time. When we one day find ourselves rising in the morning in a quizzical haze, or note a telltale drop in our smile, we usually can do little but wait and hope for the best. Fortunately, a device from Cerevast Therapeutics is about to change that situation, and give wetware users a new tool to keep things running smoothly.

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